ALT I wanted to know if anyone had experience dealing with aural hematoma as a result of an ear infection? And if so, how was it treated. My cat has an aural hematoma, and I took him to a vet. It turns out he had an ear infection which caused it. They cleaned his ears, gave him some antibiotics (I don’t which ones, but this antibiotic apparently lasts a week so they didn’t send me home with any ear drops) and gave me prednisone and said to give it to him on a schedule to help stop the head shaking. They get told me I needed a follow up in a week to see if the hematoma got any bigger or resolved but that if it didn’t I would need to get him surgery. The issue is that I have seen a lot of posts on Reddit of people saying that the prednisone often doesn’t work and you’ll often need surgery anyway and I did bring that up but the vet kept saying that non-invasive treatment is often the best start and nothing prevents a hematoma from coming back 100% and (alt text continued in next pic)

ALT she kept saying if it was her cat she’d start with the conservative treatment and so I did (what we got today) but I found out that none of the money I paid towards his treatment now which is $810.95 would go towards the surgery for it if it doesn’t resolve with the non invasive treatment which means I could be stuck paying another $1k treatment or more if it gets worse when I could’ve just paid to have it resolved when it was still small at the first visit and I gave him the prednisone but he is shaking his head much more after the vet visit than before and basically I’m wondering if I got scammed into paying more by my vet and if I should get a second opinion Btw it got bigger after we left the vet